Unlocking Literacy

A Guide for Teachers

Robert Fisher, Mary Williams

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138139329
• eBook ISBN: 9781135056490
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

An edited collection describing key issues in supporting literacy development, this book helps to 'unlock' the mysteries behind helping children learn to read, write, speak and listen. It explores ways to help children develop their skills in literacy, thinking and learning, and shows how literacy teaching can be used creatively and imaginatively with children of all ages and abilities. The new edition of this well-known text:

• reflects the importance of creativity and the new Primary Strategy
• offers approaches to teaching literacy that accord with and beyond the literacy hour
• includes coverage of the Foundation Stage curriculum in every chapter
• covers the inclusion agenda and supporting EAL pupils
• highlights the importance of popular culture and visual literacy in children's lives.

Interweaving pedagogy with theory and practical suggestions, this book is firmly based in classroom and academic research to support both trainee and practising teacher in the realities of teaching and learning in literacy.

CHAPTER 1

‘Stories are for thinking’: creative ways to share reading

Robert Fisher

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to enquiry. When we consider a book, we must not ask ourselves what it says, but what it means.

(Umberto Eco)

What's the point of a story unless you think about it?

(Karen, aged 6)

Introduction

Literacy begins in thinking about stories. In all cultures there are epic stories that have been handed down through the ages, first spoken or sung and later written, that have fed the human mind. Literacy in every culture begins in speaking, listening, seeing and thinking.

A group of eight-year-old children had been listening to the story of Adam and Eve. ‘Was there anything,’ asked the teacher, ‘that was strange, interesting or puzzling about the story?’ One child's hand shot up. ‘No,’ said the teacher. The story was a thinking story so she wanted them all to stop and think about it. She waited a minute or two while the children thought about the story. She then invited questions. This time many hands shot up. ‘How did the snake talk?’ ‘Why did God create Adam and Eve as adults and not as children?’ ‘How was the snake bad if everything in the garden was good?’ ‘Why did God make the snake?’ ‘When Adam and Eve left the garden where did they go?’ ‘Did Adam and Eve eat the wild animals?’ ‘Did the wild animals eat each other?’ ‘What happened to the Garden of Eden after Adam and Eve left it?’ ‘Did they know what a child was?’ Their questioning and discussion went on for some time. At the end, one of the children said: ‘I didn't know there was so much to think about in this story!’.

Why stories?

A story is something that might happen to you.

(Anne, aged 7)

In every language, and in every culture, stories are the fundamental way of organising human experience and understanding the world. The use of stories has long been recognised as a valuable means of developing literacy with children. Stories have the advantage of being embedded in human concerns, yet offer the child the chance to ‘de-centre’ from the immediacy of their personal lives. Stories liberate children from the here-and-now: they are intellectual constructions but they are also life-like. They are intellectually challenging, but also humanly rewarding.

One reason why stories have an affective power is that ‘stories have this crucial feature, which life and history lack, that they have beginnings and ends and so can fix meanings to events’.¹ Stories are in a sense ‘given’ in a way that life, with its messiness and incompleteness, is not. Children live in a mosaic of disconnected bits of experience. Unlike the complexity of everyday events, stories have a completeness and an ending. What makes them stories is that their ending completes (in a rational sense) or satisfies (in an affective sense) whatever was introduced at the beginning and elaborated in the middle. As Abigail, aged 8, said: ‘In stories you don't know what will happen until the end, but you know you are going to find out’.

A good story creates a possible world as an object of intellectual enquiry. What makes a story challenging is its polysemic nature, the possible layers of meaning and interpretation it contains. A good story draws us in by engaging the emotions. Rahim, aged 6, explained this by saying: ‘In a good story you never know what is going to happen next’. The fantasy element of stories allows children to reflect more clearly on real experiences through powerful imaginary experience. A story is created to be enjoyed, but if it is a good story it challenges us to interpret and understand it. In listening to stories children learn about the features of narrative, and use of language as well as imagined worlds that move them away from the here and now and engage them in what Coleridge called ‘a willing suspension of disbelief’.² Recognition of the important role of stories infuses the Framework for Teaching the Literacy Hour, at text, sentence and word level.

Children are more likely to develop into thoughtful and critical readers if teachers and parents engage them in discussing what they read. Such discussion is valuable for all children, whatever their age or ability, and is particularly important for boys who are reluctant readers.

Research has shown that children read from a wide range of genres, although adventure stories are the most popular at all ages and for both sexes.³ The range of reading that children should be introduced to includes:

• traditional stories

• fairy stories

• stories about fantasy worlds

• stories by significant children's authors

• myths, legends and folktales

• fables and animal stories

• adventure stories

• historical stories

• TV adaptations

• stories from a range of cultures

What is critical literacy?

‘I know what the words say but I don't know what they mean,’ said a seven-year-old struggling with a difficult book. The first task a reader faces is to find out what the words on the page or screen say. To be a reader one must break the code and decipher what Jamie, aged 5, called ‘all those funny squiggles, running around like tadpoles on a page’. A reader has first to break the code, decipher the strange marks, to answer the question ‘What does it say?’. Being able to say the words is not the most important part of reading, but finding out what they mean is. What motivates a reader is the web of meaning woven by the words. If we try to read a book which makes no meaning for us we soon weary of it. Children need to do more than merely say the words if they want to be good at reading: they must understand the many meanings that words convey. If we want them to be active lifelong readers; they will need to think about and develop a critical response to what they read. They need to answer the question ‘What does it mean?’.

Critical readers apply creative thinking to their reading.⁴ Helping children to be critical readers means helping them to be more than readers of the plot. They need to be able to interpret the story, to read the lines, but also to read between the lines and beyond the lines. They need the skills to be able to question, rethink and develop their ideas and understanding of what they read. We want them to discover that the reading is not over when a story is finished, but continues through reflection, inferences and deductions, through translating ideas into their own words and making their own interpretations of what they read. We want them to be able to make a personal response to the story, to answer the question, ‘What does it mean to me?’. This is a creative act, for no story or text will be responded to in quite the same way by any two readers.

If children are to become critical readers in the fullest sense they also need to be reading-users, and to answer the question, ‘What can we do with it?’. Critical readers are able to recreate and respond to texts, and also to use them for their own creative purposes. Any story can be a stimulus for a child's own story-writing (for more on developing story-writing see Chapter 6).

A reader is not the ‘author’ of the text, as some theorists have claimed, any more than a pianist playing Mozart is the composer. But a reader, like a musician, is engaged in an act of interpretation, which is also an act of self-expression. A piece of music can be played or a story read at a literal level by simply playing the notes or reading the words. But at a deeper level we understand the story (or music) by linking it to our own experience of life. This provides the deeper pleasures in reading and explains why a good story or book can be returned to again and again. As Tracy, aged 8, put it; A good story makes you think how would you feel if it happened to you’.

Texts can be used as a means of teaching children to be writers, for example by analysing the structures of texts; to be critical readers, for example by questioning the text; and to be literate thinkers, for example by developing the ability to interrogate what they read, see and hear.

Interrogating the text

‘A good story is adventure,’ said Ben, aged 6. It is an adventure for the characters involved, but is also an adventure in thinking. It invites the reader to make a leap of imagination. Children need to be helped to make the imaginative leap that expands their thinking. One way of doing this is through questioning. By asking questions, teachers model what good readers do as they try to make sense of what they read. We ask the questions we hope our children will l...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Series Editor: Robert Fisher
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. ‘Stories are for thinking’: creative ways to share reading
• 2. A poem is alive: using poetry with young children
• 3. “Jolly good,” I said’: using poetry with older children
• 4. ‘Playing with words’: word level work including phonics, vocabulary and spelling
• 5. Teaching grammar and knowledge about language
• 6. ‘Is this write?’ Learning to write and writing to learn
• 7. ‘It’s good to talk’: reinstating the place of speaking and listening in the primary classroom no
• 8. ‘Sparks which make learning vivid’: speaking, listening and drama
• 9. “Where am I going?’: planning and assessing progress in literacy
• 10. Teaching children with special educational needs (SEN) in the mainstream classroom
• 11. Using the interactive whiteboard for whole-class teaching of reading and writing
• 12. Literacy for life: the world of signs and symbols
• Index